It was summertime, and we didn’t have to attend the children’s mass and sit with our parish school classmates. Over the summer, we were free to attend the mass of our choice. Ten-fifteen mass was cool. My grandfather, tall, lean, and dressed in his black, pinstriped Sunday suit, was usually among the regulars who stood in the back of the church every week. The more aggressive of the parish priests would periodically try to sweep the stand-up crowd out of the back of the church and into the pews. Standing in the back also made for a quick, or better yet, early exit from mass. Twelve-year-old kids could not get away with standing in the back of the church.
On this warm, bright Sunday morning as I approached Fifth and Lindley and the Incarnation Church, I spotted Charlie Lobishinski standing on the corner. “Gianinni’s got a new machine,” he said. That meant a new pinball machine had been installed in Gianinnni’s drug store on the other side of Fifth Street. With a few minutes to spare before mass, Charlie and I cut across the street and went in through the propped open door of the drug store.
Gianinni’s was not a kid-friendly place. Neighborhood drug stores worked to maintain an image of dignity and professionalism that separated them out from the Mom and Pop candy stores. Pharmacists wore white smocks or neckties, and filled their walls with an intimidating array of college degrees, diplomas, licenses, and certificates. Gianinni’s was a real pharmacy, but it was also the only drugstore in the neighborhood with a pinball machine. The probable reason for a machine in the store was that the Gianinnis had a couple of teen-aged sons.
You could go in and play the pinball machine, and two, maybe three spectators or alternate players might be tolerated. But at the slightest provocation, real or imagined, Mr. Gianinni would begin shouting “Out! Out! Out, all of you!” No matter that you had a ball in play, or even three or four balls left on your nickel. When I went into Gianinni’s, I tip-toed.
Fuzzy Butler was inside trying to get the feel of the new machine. Charlie and I silently critiqued his technique as he worked the flippers and gently shook the machine to keep his ball in play. Each machine had a tilt mechanism that would shut the game down if the shaking got too vigorous. For the better players, the trick in beating any machine lay in getting the feel for the sensitivity of the tilt point. Fuzzy’s commitment to pinball approached addiction. He was good, and Charlie and I watched in silent respect as he depleted the pile of nickels that lay on the glass top of the machine.
The backlit lettering on the upright glass scoreboard read “Mexican Holiday.” Like most of the pinball machines in the neighborhood, it was the product of F. Gottlieb and Company, Chicago. The pinball machines of the 1950’s were decorated with garish, soft-core depictions of pinup girls. They were brightly lit, brightly colored, glass-topped electro-mechanical contraptions with Spike Jones sound effects, flipper buttons and solenoid sprung bumpers. They were challenging, and an ability to play well updated the W. C. Fields line about a skill for billiards indicating a misspent youth.
When Fuzzy finished up his supply of nickels without racking up any free games, which were the only thing you could win playing pinball, Charlie and I were already ten minutes past the start of mass. “I don’t have any money,” said Charlie. “Let’s go to church.” “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll see you over there.”
I didn’t have any money either. But inside my sport jacket pocket was the paper envelope that my mother gave me every Sunday when I left the house for mass. Inside that envelope, as I well knew, were three nickels. I knew. I knew. I knew. And the measure of my secret knowledge was that even though I was the only one in the store other than Mr. Gianinni, I didn’t dare bring the envelope out into the light of day. He was busy behind his prescription counter paying me no attention. Discreetly, casually, I reached inside my pocket. After some fumbling with the fingers of just one hand, I unsealed the envelope.
The three nickels, a rough equivalent to thirty pieces of silver, were loose in my pocket. As casually as I could, I took out one nickel from my pocket and let it drop into the coin slot of Mr. F. Gottlieb’s “Mexican Holiday.” That slot could have been the mouth of Satan himself. From the brightly-lit glass of the scoreboard, the painted senoritas leered at me. I fully expected alarms to begin ringing, maybe thunder, maybe lightening, maybe the sky parting and a booming voice from a biblical movie revealing to the world just exactly what I had done. In very short order, all three nickels were gone. I had not beaten the new machine. I had not racked up any free games.
Unsmitten by any avenging angels of the Lord, I went outside into the warm morning sunshine and thought, what now? Too late to go into church. Besides, what would I do when the head usher, usually the dapper, wavy-haired Beau Barnes, the parish’s most eligible bachelor, ran his long-handled wicker basket under my nose? I had nothing to offer but a torn, empty envelope, the incriminating evidence of my sacrilege. I knew also in my soul that when that happened, the entire congregation of the ten-fifteen mass in the basement church at Incarnation, including my own grandfather, would turn in unison to face me, my mortal sin revealed to all creation, the living and the dead.
On the other hand, it was a nice day. If I skirted the church by way of Ashdale Street, no one would see me. No one would know I was bagging mass. I could walk over to Third and up to Duncannon and see if anybody was hanging out at Joe’s candy store. On the way over, with the fingers of the same one hand in my pocket, I could tear the empty collection envelope into tiny pieces, and I could let them drop to the sidewalk, piece by piece by piece. No one would ever know.
Across the Fifth Street trolley tracks from Gianinni’s Pharmacy, in perfect, if not coincidental proximity to the Incarnation Church, was the Quinn Funeral Home. It was conceded that eventually Tom Quinn would plant everyone in Olney, every Catholic at least. A dapper man, tall, elegant and given to the dark suits of his trade, Mr. Quinn wore his gray-black hair slicked back flat to his head. Further setting him apart was a waxed and spiked “Kaiser Bill” mustache with sharp, stiff points that stuck out almost an inch on each side of the main growth. It was said of the hairy signature on Tom Quinn’s upper lip, that it had never gotten wet. When old Tom hoisted a drink, something he was known to do with regularity, the points of the mustache supposedly turned upward of their own accord.
The Quinns’ were among the first in the neighborhood to get a television set. I went to school with the youngest of the Quinn kids, Terry. He and I shared a passion for everything having to do with the recent war, and I was invited in to watch several episodes of the documentary series based on the Eisenhower book, “Crusade in Europe.” Growing up in a funeral parlor, Terry’s idea of great fun was try to spook his friends by walking them through the embalming room. A story that gained currency with every telling was that Joey Schwartz wet himself when Terry turned the lights off and left him in there with a corpse. The vehemence of Joey’s denials kept the tale alive for years. While I was afraid of virtually everything, that kind of stuff didn’t bother me. After my second visit, Terry didn’t bother with the detour through the embalming room.
I had first been to Quinn’s in 1946 when I was eight years old, following the death of my grandmother, my father’s mother. Over the years, I found myself back there again and again, mumbling a “sorry for your troubles,” and finally having it mumbled to me. I was in Quinn’s the night in 1954 when my father’s oldest brother, my Uncle Matt, was laid out for viewing. The heat of the family estrangement following the Christmas Day donnybrook of 1945 had cooled with the passage of nearly a decade. The neutral ground of the funeral home, and most profoundly the untimely death of their brother at the age of forty-eight had put the remaining eight brothers and sisters on their best behavior. All but Mickey.
Mickey was my Uncle Michael, the youngest of my father’s four brothers. Mickey had been in the war, in the infantry. He’d been in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. We didn’t see much of Mickey, but when we did, he left an impression. Before the family had fallen apart, Mickey had been my favorite uncle. Like many alcoholics, Mickey was a charmer. He always seemed to be having fun. He was irreverent, teasing, laughing, full of life, a benign wise guy. My brother and I thought Mickey was great. We thought he was funny. Later, my mother knowingly would add something like, “yeah, your Uncle Mickey’s real funny all right.”
The night of my Uncle Matt’s viewing, the main room of Quinn’s was overflowing with friends, neighbors and relatives in their somber best. My Uncle Matt had seemed to me to be a distant, difficult man. He and my father, though never close, were thrown together as the two non-drinkers among the nine brothers and sisters. The untimely nature of Matt’s death at forty-eight barely registered on my sixteen-year-old mind. To me forty-eight was old, and old people died. We were standing next to the open casket surrounded by the usual overwhelming array of large, floral arrangements when sounds of a commotion arose from near the front door. “Mickey, cut it out,” I heard my Uncle Joe shout. Mickey was having none of it. He pushed his way up to the casket dragging his brothers, my Uncle Joe and Uncle Frank, with him. He was wobbly on his feet, but his voice was strong. “What the hell kind of a tribe are we, anyway?” A rhetorical question as his voice cracked and broke. “Jesus Christ,” he sobbed. “It takes one of us lying dead in a box before we can talk to each other.” He was just getting wound up, but Joe and Frank had him under the arms, and were steering him through the now silent crowd toward the door and out on to Fifth Street. “C’mon Mickey, let’s get you some air,” I heard Frank say. By now my twin aunts, Nelly and Norah were bellowing, and their younger sisters Ann and Catherine had picked up the wail. It was like the aftermath of a bombing. Several long minutes elapsed before the flat, droning buzz of small talk could resume and absorb the last of the shock waves set off by Mickey’s drunken lament. Years later Mickey did get sober, and he and my father reconciled. The surface geniality and the requisite pleasantries they would exchange at family functions hid a cautious and tentative formality. They were brothers, but too much had been said, too much had happened for them to ever again be friends.
Going past, to or from Quinn’s Funeral Home, meant passing Munder’s Plumbing Supply where Mr. Munder kept the shop window filled with the scale models made by his son Richard. The craftsmanship was dazzling and the permanent collection included at least one masterpiece, a meticulously detailed, two-foot balsa-wood replica of a Japanese submarine. I doubt I ever walked past without stopping or at least slowing down to look at that perfectly detailed model, its conning tower topped by a tiny cloth flag, a hand-painted Rising Sun. I stayed on guard to not allow Richard Munder ever to catch me admiring his work. His puffed-up sense of himself approached the insufferable. It was hard to say hello to Richard without his trying to impress you about what a big deal he was. In the words of my mother, Richard was always “putting an act on.” He went on to become a doctor with a practice up on Fifth Street near Tabor Road. If his name and status came up, someone would inevitably add that, “yeah, but he’s not a real doctor, not an M.D. He’s one of those other kind of doctors, an osteopath.” You want to move up, you better move out.
Crossing Lindley Avenue and coming north on Fifth Street, the block to Duncannon Avenue was dominated by the lawn of the Incarnation Church. A wall, in the same gray granite as the church itself, was shoulder high to a ten-year-old, and ran for half the distance of the block. When the aged Irish monsignor died, a memorial in his honor was proposed. After a fund drive, the choices for the tribute boiled down to building a library for the parish school, endowing a college scholarship in the name of the late pastor, or erecting a statue of Our Lady of Fatima in a stone grotto on the church lawn where the faithful could stop to say their decades of the Rosary. After a charade of an open process, the new pastor happily announced the winner. It would be the grotto, of course.
The neighborhood’s only automobile dealership, the showroom and garage of Oxford Auto Sales, a Hudson franchise, lay just past the end of the church property. It opened in 1946, cashing in on the bottled-up demand for cars caused by the four-year wartime halt in civilian car production. The agency’s owner, a short man, looked like a cross between Lowell Thomas and Howard Hughes. He had a Clark Gable pencil mustache, and he wore a wide brimmed brown fedora, and rolled the sleeves of his white shirts up above his elbows. He always wore a necktie. Passing him going to and from school at Incarnation, the kids began addressing him as Mr. Hudson. At first, he’d stop us and correct us, stating that his name was Mr. Billingsley, not Mr. Hudson. The kids paid him no heed, and soon even adults were referring to him as Mr. Hudson. Figuring that it was probably good for business, he gave up and seemed to accept his identification with his product. The Hudson Motorcar Company went out of business in 1957, joining Kaiser, Fraser, Packard, DeSoto and so many others in the junkyard of American automotive nameplates.
Across the wide span of Duncannon Avenue on Fifth Street, Bill’s Saloon was another taproom with a spotty reputation. On warm afternoons, going back to school from lunch, we could look into the darkness through the open door under the sign that read “Ladies Entrance,” and see neighborhood ladies of sorts in housedresses sitting at the bar. One of my schoolmates, Billy Dunphy, lived a few doors up the street, and his father was a regular in Bill’s. Mr. Dunphy would get off the Forty-Seven Car coming home from work and disappear into Bill’s. An hour or two later, he’d be seen reeling up Duncannon Avenue toward home, toward God knows what kind of a homecoming. At the fiftieth reunion of our parish school class, I sat next to Billy Dunphy and noted that he nursed Diet Cokes all night.
Like many of the retail businesses in our neighborhood, the fresh fruit and vegetable store next to Bill’s Saloon was the economic equivalent of a street vendor with walls and a front door. The proprietor, a grim-faced Jewish man, was assisted by an equally taciturn wife who limped and wore clunky orthopedic shoes. The husband had a black toothbrush mustache and wore eyeglasses with lenses that were almost opaque. In the morning, the two of them would be out on the sidewalk setting up the worn wooden display table that held the cases of apples, oranges, turnips, potatoes, cabbages. No matter the weather, he wore the same black, long-sleeved, button-front sweater, a white apron and a brown pork-pie hat with the brim turned up all around. As we walked by his store on our way to and from school, he’d look right through and past us. On those few discomforting occasions when we made eye contact, I would feel compelled to nod or say hello. I never got a response. When I heard them speaking to customers, it was in heavy guttural accents. They were already there when we moved to Olney in 1945, which would seem to preclude their having been Holocaust survivors. Possibly they had gotten out before the full catastrophe. What private or historical circumstances accounted for the sad, cold detachment they seemed to feel for the world surrounding them I’ll never know. They lived above the store, and sometimes on Sunday mornings, I’d see them waiting silently at the trolley stop on the other side of Fifth Street, dressed in the same clothes they wore all week.
If a Middle-Europa darkness hung over the tiny fruit and vegetable store, Joe Lalli’s shoe repair next door was all Italian sunlight. The days of closets filled with shoes for all occasions were still decades away. Like most of the kids we knew, my brother and I each had two pairs of shoes, one pair for good and the other for school and play. Heroic efforts were usually in order to avoid spending for new shoes. Worn down heels would be replaced by durable hard rubber heels that left black marks on wooden floors. The steel cleats nailed into heels and toes that extended the life of cheap shoes made walking down the aisle at mass sound like a tap dancing class. Half-soles tacked and sewn to uppers, and leather top and side patches that never quite matched were our badges of worthy frugality. If one of us came home with a sole flapping or a heel worn thin, my mother’s first recourse was always a trip to Joe’s Shoe Repair. The expenditure of six dollars and ninety-five cents for new shoes at Father and Son Shoes up Fifth Street was her last resort.
Joe Lalli’s shoe repair shop created a lasting sensory impact. In addition to the smells of fresh leather, the caustic odors of the glues, solvents and polishes of the cobbler’s trade, there was the sound of the all-day Italian radio broadcasts turned up loud enough to override the whirring and whooshing of Joe’s amazing array of belt-driven brushes and grinders. Joe himself was a wiry little man with a head of equally wiry and frizzed-out gray hair that made every kid who saw him think of Larry Fine of Three Stooges fame. Joe liked to chat, but his almost impenetrable Italian accent made the process painful. To the dramatic aural backdrop of grand opera, Joe would take up the shoes my mother had brought in. He would squint, scratch his head and carefully examine the questionable shoes like the craftsman he was. My mother would silently await his cost-benefit analysis on the salvageability of a worn out pair of seven dollar shoes as if Joe were a surgeon making a life or death decision. We were steady customers at Joe’s, and he stayed on in his Fifth Street shop long after the neighborhood changed, after Italian radio went off the air and after worn shoes became throw-away items.
Between Joe Lalli’s shoe repair shop and home stood the first of my many adolescent sanctuaries, Leon’s Luncheonette. Hanging out at Leon’s had started while I was twelve-years-old and in the seventh grade at Incarnation. For the next two-and-a-half years, until the afternoon of Tommy Scalen and Bobby Falco’s vicious ridicule of Leon had taken my measure and found me wanting, I had been content to spend my every leisure moment inside or out on the sidewalk in front of Leon’s. Within weeks of what had been my first, but not my last, experience of anti-Semitism, I drifted east on Duncannon Avenue to find a new home at Joe Sheperla’s Candy Store. The circle I entered at Joe’s was wilder, more adventurous and more prone to trouble. There were cars, beer and occasionally girls. I felt I had moved up in the world.
I kept in touch with what was happening at Leon’s. On a warm Sunday morning in late March of 1952, coming up Fifth Street on my way home from nine-o-clock mass in the Incarnation’s basement church, I saw Mort Callahan and Bobby Falco sitting on O’Dea’s front steps next to Leon’s. I stopped and lit a cigarette, offering one to Bobby. Mort Callahan didn’t smoke. Mort lived on the western marches of the neighborhood, over in Logan, a couple of doors away from a small orthodox synagogue on Eighth Street just off Lindley Avenue. On Sabbath, he got paid to turn the lights on and off, move chairs, to do whatever couldn’t be done by observant members of the congregation. Some wise guy began calling him the rabbi. That turned into the Reverend Mordicai Callahan, which in turn became Mort. His real name was Robert.
Lighting my cigarette and Bobby’s, I had the long view down Fifth Street toward the traffic light at Duncannon. I’d be able to see my mother and father coming up the street from church. One of the myths of my home life was that I didn’t smoke, and I did my best not to make an issue of it. A year later and five miles away, as I stood smoking away on the corner of Sixth and Susquehanna waiting for the Route Thirty-Nine Car, my mother going past on the Forty-Seven spotted me. Feeling secure so far away from home, I was shocked to hear her voice from the passing trolley. “I see you smokingggg,” she sang out in a fade as the Forty-Seven car slid away down Sixth Street. A pack a day smoker for over three and a half years, it was the first time I’d been caught in the act.
Whatever the conversation I had going with Bobby and Mort, it was interrupted by a car pulling slowly up to curb with the engine running noisily. It was a rusted four-door sedan in faded black, probably a 1935 or 1936 Pontiac or a Plymouth. I know the headlights were exterior mounts on the fenders and they started putting them in the fenders with the 1937 models. While the car itself was unremarkable, the face of the driver sitting low behind the wheel was a shocker. It was Ronnie Cusak. Ronnie had been in my eighth-grade class at Incarnation. Ronnie was the same age as me, fourteen. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1952, as now, fourteen-year olds were not licensed to operate motor vehicles.
The Cusaks had arrived in the neighborhood while I was in seventh-grade. Ronnie and his two younger brothers, I think there was also a sister, immediately gaining a reputation for trouble and worse, fearlessness. The whole Cusak family had a shabby, raggedy look. They had moved into a rundown corner house at Sixth and Fishers. Ronnie affected a quiet, devil-may-care attitude. He was funny in a sly, quiet way, but was quick to take offence and had an inordinate number of fistfights in the short time they’d lived in the neighborhood. I didn’t hang out with Ronnie, nor had I had any real run ins with him, other than the night before Thanksgiving a year and a half earlier when I gotten drunk for the first time in my life. Ronnie had been one of the kids who had stolen the case of beer that we carted off into the dark recesses of the Morrison schoolyard.
Much amused, Mort, Bobby and I walked over to the open passenger side window to see what was going on. Ronnie grinned back at us, his hand on the big vibrating gearshift rod that rose from the hump in the center of the floor. His little brother, a couple of grades behind us at Incarnation, was on the passenger side of the front bench seat. “Wanna go for a ride,” smiled Ronnie. “Get in the back, Tommy,” he said to his brother. Tommy climbed over the seat, throwing himself into the back of the car. Bobby got in front. Mort and I joined Tommy in the back of the car. I had the rear passenger side window. To my disappointment, the crank wouldn’t turn and the window wouldn’t go down. Not being in cars very often, I felt that having the window down was the major thrill element of a car ride.
At ten on a Sunday morning, there was little or no traffic on Fifth Street. Ronnie released the clutch and the car began lurching and jerking as he spun it into a U-turn and headed south on Fifth Street, sliding on the trolley tracks as he picked up speed. The air was filled by the suffering sound of metal on metal as Ronnie yanked and twisted the shifting arm in his attempts to find the next higher gear. Distracted by the complexities of shifting gears, he lost control of the wheel. As we swerved across Fifth Street, I heard the clanging bell of the oncoming trolley car before I saw it. A large, dark green shape flashed past by the narrowest of inches as we sped on our mad path down Fifth Street and right through the red light at Lindley Avenue.
We had a Green light at Rockland Street, and Ronnie managed to slow the car as we went down the short slope toward Roosevelt Boulevard. If he had tried to run the red signal across Roosevelt Boulevard, ten lanes wide, there probably would have been at least five full Requiem Masses later that week in the upper church at Incarnation. The fate of the occupants of another car or cars didn’t enter my mind. At the light Ronnie wrestled with the shifter, grinding away in a failing attempt to find first gear. Bobby Falco suggested that if Ronnie would work the clutch, he Bobby, would do the shifting. Off we went, with just a few less lurching spasms.
Looking around, I saw what a sad junker the Cusak family car was. Dirty windows, stuffing coming out of the seats, headliner ripped and hanging, and old food and trash covering the seats and floor. We headed up the hill to Hunting Park Avenue, and I turned to Tommy Cusak to ask what would happen if their father discovered the car missing. “Shit,” he said and shrugged. “Nothing. And he won’t even know it’s gone. Neither of them are going to come to until this afternoon.” I knew plenty of kids who had drunken fathers, but this was the first family I’d encountered where both the mother and the father were problem boozers.
Ronnie did a squealing two-wheeler around the corner of Fifth and Erie, throwing me, Tommy and Mort Callahan into a heap against the driver’s side door. Another screaming turn up a narrow side street of row houses followed by a lurching slowdown as Bobby Falco twisted the shifting arm to find a lower gear. Ronnie slid the car to a stop and said, “that’s my Grandmom’s house. We used to live there before we moved to Inky,” he said. “She’s dead now,” he added as we began to cruise past a row of old look-alike, flat-fronted row houses. I remember that some of the houses still had the Sunday papers lying on their small, white marble front steps.
Ronnie worked the car back on to Erie Avenue with Bobby still shifting and we ran east to Front Street where another near rollover occurred as we turned too fast to head north and back toward the neighborhood. By now the novelty and the excitement of going fast in a car had faded. I just wanted Ronnie to slow down enough to get us back in one piece.
Back across the boulevard, where fortunately the light was green, we made our way through the quiet neighborhood streets back to Fifth Street. Ronnie slowed to a stop about ten feet out from the curb at Leon’s, and I knew I was fortunate to be getting out of that car on my own power. Tommy climbed back over the seat into the front next to Ronnie, who nonchalantly tooted the horn as he tried to get the shifter into first gear. Screeching, jerking and swerving, he flew away north toward Fishers Avenue and home. I saw him at the newspaper branch the next afternoon and asked if he’d gotten in any trouble over taking the car. “Nah,” he said. “My old man didn’t know what day it was when he got up, let alone that anybody had moved that fucking car.” Before the year was gone, so were the Cusaks. My mother, who kept an ear to the ground, said they’d been put out of their house for getting behind on the rent.
More than twenty years later, I ran into Mort Callahan. Among other things, he said that late one night he had cut a yellow light too close on Rhawn Street. Behind him came the flashing lights of a police car. When the cop came up to ask to see his license, the cop was Ronnie Cusak. “We recognized each other right away,” said Mort. “I knew he wasn’t going to give me a ticket, but he stood there while we got caught up on old times, him with same goofy grin of his. And then,” said Mort, “of all people, he’s got the balls to tell me I should be more careful about my driving.”
Tags: olney, frankford, lindley theater, erie avenue, roosevelt boulevard, duncannon avenue, philadelphia, memoir, 1945-1955, germantown, kurfursterdamm, the prado, fifth avenue, sam clemens, william penn, city of brotherly love, cheltenham avenue, montgomery county, godfrey avenue, somerville avenue, stanley-warner theaters, lionel electric trains, belgian blocks, king solomon's mines, stewart granger, first cmmunion, five-dollar nights, ortlieb's beer, rockland street, f.b.i., ruscomb street, ashdale, street, taprooms, f. gottlieb and company, w.c. fields, "kaiser bill" mustache, crusade in europe, eisenhower, infantry, north africa, sicily, italy, m.d., osteopath, incarnation church, our lady of fatima, rosary, hudson automobiles, howard hughes, lowell thomas, calrk gable, kaiser, fraser, packard, de soto, pork pie hat, holocaust survivors, italian language radio, father and son shoes, larry fine, the three stooges, anti-semitism, plymouth, pontiac, hunting park avenue, requiem mass, rhawn street
September 24, 2008 at 4:14 pm |
first time i have read your blog i have RSS bkd you, please post more.
appreciated